“It has been a hard journey, but we never gave up”, he added. “Aside from the contact for the #1 car early in the race, we made no mistakes and the cars ran well”.
Running well is one thing, but conceding an overall race deficit of around 20 minutes to their opposition will not sit well at the board at Toyota. That said, they experienced a relative dream run compared to their compatriots at Nissan.
Just one of the three-entered GT-R LM NISMO’s crossed the finish-line at Le Mans, with a best time a whopping 18 seconds down on the fastest lap of the race.
After incurring a grid penalty for falling outside the 120% window in qualifying, Jann Mardenborough’s best lap was mercifully eight-tenths up on the nearest LMP2 entry.
With the race now confined to a glorified test session, all three NISMO’s succumbed to a variety of technical problems including clutch and suspension issues, but the most significant being braking; putting enormous load on the front-engined prototype and heavily compromising corner speed.
While the number 22 entry of Harry Tincknell, Alex Buncombe and Michael Krumm did make it to the finish, they crossed the line outside the minimum mandatory 70% distance needed to be classified. It was a cruel irony that bookended Nissan’s woes in qualifying, but surely won hearts from race fans with their tenacity and dedication to keep their entries alive for so long.
Rebellion Racing were the first privateers across the line, despite having both R-Ones in the garage concurrently after on-track altercations. Their updated package proved more competitive than its forbearer, but unreliability saw off any chance of repeating their miracle fourth-place finish in last year’s event.
Race - 24 Hours of Le Mans